5 must-have marketing tools for the lean startup

**MailChimp **Nothing beats the measurement and attribution capabilities for multiple lists for the price. Your startup more than likely doesn’t overkill nurturing capabilities that expensive solutions have. Use third-party integrations with SalesForce to associate email campaigns with lifecycle and behavior groups of your users/customers. **Rapportive **Know everything about a potential partner from a pane in Gmail. Instant connectivity to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase with contacts is awesome for quick update on partners, customers and prospects.

What does it take to make a successful iPhone application?

**What does it take to make a successful iPhone application? **

Before answering what does it take to make a successful iPhone application we have to define what makes an application successful. Sapient always asks why are we building something, what are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to measure it; so starting from top down, what are the business objectives, the key performance indicators, and all metrics. iPhone applications usually serve one of two purposes: drive brand or drive revenue.

**Objective: Drive brand **Applications that drive brand most likely are free since they have to target a broad reach. Objective is usually increase awareness, brand recall, or word of mouth, and is traditionally measured based on simple downloads, usage, and extended with how many share with friends, stickiness, and engagement levels. A good way to take it one step further is tie in social media monitoring and analyze share and velocity of voice, general sentiment, and overall impact of the application within social conversations.

Now that we understand how to measure it, what will the application do? Nowadays brands cannot push messages to the consumers, they have to provide value and we generally call it brand as an enabler. Applications that drive brand usually fall under one of two categories: be entertaining or be useful. Entertaining applications usually have a wider adoption, more downloads, but less engagement as users open it just a few times before they get bored. Useful applications have a smaller reach but higher engagement; less users will download the application, but they will use it much more than simple entertainment applications. However the key for both types is simplicity.